CRASHWORTHY DESIGN AND EVALUATION ON THE FRONT-END STRUCTURE OF KOREAN HIGH SPEED TRAIN

摘要

An intensive study was conducted for the crashworthy structural design of the recently developed Korean High Speed Train (KHST). Two main design concepts were set up to protect both crews and passengers from serious injury in heavy collision accidents, and to reduce damage to the train itself in light collision accidents. A collision against a movable 15-ton rigid obstacle at 110 kph was selected from train accident investigations as the accident scenario for the heavy collisions. A train-to-train collision at the relative velocity of 16 kph was used for the light collision. The crashworthiness behaviors of KHST were numerically evaluated using FEM. Analysis results using 1-D collision dynamics model of the full rake consist and 3-D shell element model of the front end structure showed good crashworthy responses in a viewpoint of structural design. Occupant analyses and sled tests demonstrated that KHST performed well enough to protect occupants under the considered accident scenarios. Finally our numerical approaches were evaluated by a real scale collision test.